Untitled (2012)
Installation with OSB board and sheet metal
121 × 95 × 54 cm
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2012.475
“I am interested in the place where the ambiguous, the absurd, and the ironic converge. The experience of the everyday, the limit, the process as an important part of the whole, and placing the viewer in a state of situation.
I became a beekeeper in a poppy field; I have stolen energy from several institutions to give it a functional use and activate different informal devices; I search for shrapnel from the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, which I later melt in a forge. I challenge systems of power and conceive resistance as an open concept, as natural as tensioning. The possibility of code, the ambiguity between politics and life, is a constant in my work, which for me is driven by activism.” (Text taken from the website of Miriam Isasi Arce).
The project `No existe delito en los procesos naturales´ [There is no crime in natural processes] is aimed at an investigation of the division of land used for opium plantations between the south of Álava and north of Burgos. The installation will be followed up by placing beehives near the plantations with the aim of extracting poppy honey. The aim of this project is to list and locate the plantations and thereby trespass on the boundaries controlled by government.
Miriam Isasi Arce holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country and later completed a PhD in Fine Arts at the UPV/EHU and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her work focuses on creating a bridge between the procedural and the experimental. Her projects are usually defined in a specific place, where she intervenes through action. Territory and its specific characteristics are constant elements in her practice. From a contemporary standpoint, she generates a discourse built through references to anthropology, history, activism, parasitism, landscape, and memory as a source of sustenance, by seeking legal loopholes and liminal spaces, and employing an ironic and absurd tone, she addresses the direct relationship between the author and space through installation, unifying the most experiential aspect of the creative act.